Ghost in the Drum Machine

Fame sneaked up on EDM pioneer RP Boo, but success doesn’t scare him.

The next time you’re at Lowe’s, take a look at the person
in the back unloading drywall. That guy could spend his off-hours as a
musical pioneer.

It’s true of RP Boo.
He is the founder of footwork, the polyrhythmic electronic dance music
style that’s allowed DJs like Rashad and Slugo to build successful,
internationally recognized careers. Until this year, though, the
41-year-old was unknown outside his hometown of Chicago, and working in
receiving at the home-improvement retailer. With the May release of his
album, Legacy, Boo is finally being recognized. It took almost two decades to happen, but he isn’t bitter.

“Rashad is very
versatile, very good,” Boo says of footwork’s most well-known
practioner. He laughs. “If the people like Rashad, wait ’til RP comes
over. He’s gonna show you where it comes from.”

Boo introduced
Chicago to footwork back in 1997, via the Ol’ Dirty Bastard-sampling
“Baby Come On.” Though it shares some traits with the style known as
juke—a boiling tempo around 160 beats per minute and the use of drum
machines instead of drum samples, namely—footwork takes everything else
to the next level. Juke’s slightly off-kilter house beats become a
stammering collection of drums barely qualifying as a rhythm, and where
juke also uses repetitive hip-hop samples, footwork pitch-shifts and
filters them. In short, it sounds like house music having a seizure.

As with many musical
phenomenons, Boo created footwork largely by accident. He’d been moving
feet in the Windy City underground since 1991, with just a pair of
turntables. “I was playing what the radio would play, so hip-hop and
R&B,” he says. “It was hard for me to get house music. I didn’t know
the history of it.” As he was exposed to more of Chicago’s vaunted
music scene, including house, Boo became interested in not just playing
songs but producing them. He saved money and bought a display copy of a
Roland R-70 drum machine—one that came without an instruction manual. He
improvised a cumbersome, imperfect method for copying drum patterns,
and began making beats based around hectic, stuttering rhythms only the
best dancers could detect. Footwork was born.

The title of Boo’s new album is ironic: Other than Legacy,
a few compilation appearances and double-copied cassettes passed around
Chicago, Boo doesn’t have any official releases to his name. He claims
to have upward of 800 unreleased tracks, showcasing both his versatility
and just how far ahead of the game he’s been. “I can take two years off
and come back and play a track that’s 10 years old and people will
think it’s two days old, or they swear someone else made it,” he says.

In 2010, the English label Planet Mu—which also issued Legacy—put out a compilation titled Bangs & Works Vol. 1,
featuring two Boo songs, “Total Darkness” and “Eraser,” which proved
instrumental in opening ears outside Chicago to footwork in general and
Boo specifically. Since then, footwork has taken off, especially in
continental Europe. Boo, however, has never toured there—or at all, for
that matter. His upcoming show in Portland will be his first on the West
Coast. He’s not reveling in his newfound worldwide stardom, though,
even after going for two decades with his talent unnoticed. Nor does he
seem overly concerned with being underappreciated in the past. He just
seems grateful for the opportunity to bring his creation to a larger
audience.

“The mentors that I had are the
ones I have today—that’s the crowd of people that’s enjoying the music,”
Boo says. “I feed off what they do.” The Portland show probably won’t
have many warp-speed dancers footworking to his music, but Boo doesn’t
mind. “I don’t care if people know how to footwork,” he says. “I’m gonna
tell you what you do: Be yourself. That’s the most beautiful thing. If
you movin’, I got you.”